Santiago Calatrava Quotes

French architecture always manages to combine the most magnificent underlying themes of architecture; like Roman design, it looks to the community.

Imagine for a second that the Golden Gate had not been built. This place in the San Francisco Bay would be one of the many beautiful places along the Pacific Coast - but that's all. Once you put the bridge there, you distinguish it from any other place in the world.

The greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy... which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity.

I would have loved to be the designer of the Capitol of the United States. I would love to do some important major public building.

To go back to architecture, what's organic about architecture as a field, unlike product design, is this whole issue of holism and of monumentality is really our realm. Like, we have to design things which are coherent as a single object, but also break down into small rooms and have an identity of both the big scale and the small scale.

I would say that to put architecture in the chain of history, to be able to interpret and understand why we are where we are, is quite crucial.

As an architect, you have to provide a shelter to enjoy art. And you have to love art. It's like when you make a concert hall. You must love music. This is the reason why you make the space, to enjoy music - making a space for art is the same thing.

Building is just skilled labor, I suppose. It's a lot of work. I don't mind other people building them, but the way things go together and are made is interesting to me; I like that a lot.

To me, architecture is an art, naturally, and it isn't architecture unless it's alive. Alive is what art is. If it's not alive, it's dead, and it's not art.

You're presuming too much by using the word legacy - presuming that someone is going to care.

Frank Lloyd Wright... his things were beautiful but not very functional.

Major social movements eventually fade into the landscape not because they have diminished but because they have become a permanent part of our perceptions and experience.

Sun Tzu does not need my praise. His work has lived for over two thousand years, and will surely live for another two thousand without any help from me.

The new architecture of transparency and lightness comes from Japan and Europe.

Some people think architecture is about the genius sketch; I don't. Great architecture is a collaboration among a lot of people over a long period of time.

My father was a construction engineer, and my mother was a production engineer.

A building has at least two lives - the one imagined by its maker and the life it lives afterward - and they are never the same.

It's important for people who criticise architects - whether what they build is or isn't to your taste - to appreciate how they devote themselves and put everything into bringing a building into existence.

I see the Beijing National Stadium as an architectural project. I accepted Herzog and De Meuron's invitation to collaborate on the design, and our proposal won the competition. From beginning to end, I stayed with the project. I am committed to fostering relationships between a city and its architecture.

If I weren't involved with food, I'd be working in architecture. Design is that critical to me.

Architecture aims at Eternity.

Well-building hat three conditions. Commodity, firmness, and delight.

… a day that will live in world history …

History will show that the Celto-Saxon people have been the main builders, designers, engineers, explorers, and even humanitarians in comparison to any other race or nationality

That's why we're here: to leave a legacy that'll be remembered long after we're done. And what a great start to my legacy, man, being the first UFC flyweight champion.